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BEIJING–At 51, Ai Wei Wei is as close as one gets to a living legend in China – a builder, blogger and performance artist known for his fiercely independent mind.

He's also no stranger to controversy.

He was a key concept designer for the Bird's Nest stadium, for example. But when the opening ceremonies approached for last summer's Olympics, he thumbed his nose at them.

"I denounced the Games," he says, sitting in his sunlit studio in east Beijing. "I said, `I'm not participating in something that's going to be pure propaganda.'"

"And?" he's asked.

"I was proven right," he says.

Now Ai has set his sights on unearthing one of China's most closely guarded secrets.

He wants to know – and he wants the rest of China to know – how many students died in the Sichuan earthquake. He wants their names, grades and schools.

For too long, Ai says, facts – "major truths," he calls them – have been hidden from the Chinese people.

"Nobody knows," he says.

"Nobody knows how many people died in the Cultural Revolution. Nobody knows how many people died on June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre).

"Nobody knows how many people died in Tibet," he says, referring to last year's riots.

"You know?" he says, pausing a moment. "Everything is a blur."

But the government is determined to keep the names and numbers of the dead students secret.

They know the May 12 earthquake – almost one year after it struck – remains a potentially explosive issue.

That's because many grieving parents believe their children died seated at their desks – not because of the magnitude of the quake, which hit 7.9 on the Richter scale, but because many state schools were shoddily built.

Parents saw schools reduced to rubble while other structures, standing right next door, withstood the quake's force.

Knowing that parental anger could be a political liability of quake-like proportions if unleashed, the government is doing what it can to suppress it.

In recent days, Sichuan police arrested Tan Zuoren, a man well known among parents for using the Internet to field information from grieving families.

Ai, however, has remained untouched. He's pressing on and wants the government to confront the truth.

"I want them to say: `Yes, those buildings were wrongly built – and we won't do it again.'

"I don't care if they punish a few construction people or a few corrupt officials," he says. "That's not what I'm interested in.

"I want a government and a nation that bears responsibility. Without responsibility this nation goes nowhere."

These are powerful words – especially in an authoritarian state.

Ai got the idea of pursuing the names after spending a week in the quake-stricken area last May, walking through the rubble of Dujiangyan, Mianyang, Hanwang and elsewhere, talking to parents and other survivors.

He says he felt "devastated" after the quake, but couldn't bring himself to trust any agency or charity to which to donate money.

His wariness was borne out: large sums were raked off by corrupt officials and others with access.

So he went to Sichuan himself.

Moved by the pain of parents, he later gathered a core of 20 volunteers, which eventually grew to 200 and, with no help from the government, they've now collected the names of more than 3,400 children who died.

How many students does he think perished overall?

"I have absolutely no idea," he says, noting that state media have offered at least three different versions: between 6,000 and 7,000; fewer than 20,000 and fewer than 10,000.

"Of course we don't want just the numbers," he says. "We want to know who they are, how old they were .. which class, which grade, which school."

"Then we ask, what's the reason" they died?

Ai calls his team of young volunteers "a movement." Every day they go out and gather research, post names on Ai's website to commemorate the dead and conduct interviews with parents for a documentary film.

Last week, a member of the film team was arrested and later released.

"They questioned him about me," says Ai, who is making the film "for the nation" but admits that it probably stands no chance of airing in China. "I'll just put it on YouTube," he says.

The Chinese government recently blocked YouTube – for days on end – the result of a seven-minute film mounted on the site showing Chinese authorities beating Tibetans.

But for Ai's volunteers, it's more than just a film. It's a kind of education, he says.

"It's the beginning of civic consciousness, civic responsibility."

Government officials, meanwhile, continue to block his efforts.

Ai lists a litany of government offices he has phoned personally.

"People just laugh at me," he says, telling him, "`This is a top national secret ... You must be insane ... Why do you need these numbers? What's your purpose?'"

In the end, officials claim it's a privacy matter, telling Ai he should seek the parents' permission.

Since then, thousands of parents have given him names – asking that he post them on his website. Each day Ai and his team highlight the day's postings with a photo of a burning candle.

Presumably the central government in Beijing has many of the answers to Ai's questions.

Last year, it sent its own experts to Sichuan to investigate and later, in a September press conference, admitted some schools had been thrown up in a hurry and were shabbily built.

But they wouldn't give the number of such schools, their location or other details – certainly not the names of the deceased.

"Everyone who died is an individual," proclaims Ai.

"The only real property people have is their name. They don't have anything else."

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